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Walter Brown, Marine Corsair
Aviator By Patrick J. Scannon, MD, PhD 12 February 02 The Past On the morning of 4 March 1945, a young Marine aviator tipped his bomb-laden Corsair into a 70 dive 20,000 feet over Koror, headquarters for all Japanese Imperial forces throughout Palau and Micronesia. The target: Battery Hill, a concentration of Japanese antiaircraft (AA) batteries that had shot down many American fighters and bombers over this midsection of the Palau Islands. With one eye on his bombsight, he made final adjustments to his rudder trim tab control to insure he was not skidding off-target. As he approached 400 knots, a last glance at his altimeter had him at 8500 feet above target. By then he realized he was in the midst of the worst AA fire he had ever seen and already was thinking he would be lucky to get out of it alive. At this instant, with these thoughts fixed in his mind, he heard a loud explosion from below his cockpit - he knew he was hit and immediately started leveling out. Smoke and flames suddenly filled his cockpit as the white phosphorus round ignited the 100 Octane leaking from the fuel lines below his feet. Reflexively, the aviator next threw back his canopy, only to have the flames erupt like a blowtorch raging between his legs and burning him severely. He unbuckled himself and almost made it out the right side of his cockpit but his left foot wedged under the instrument panel. He was now half in and half out of his Corsair, which could explode at any moment - his goggles and other gear flew past him but he could not pull himself free. With his body repeatedly slamming against his fuselage in the slipstream while plummeting toward the ground, his trapped leg mercifully broke under the pressure. It saved his life by releasing him from the instrument panel - at least for the moment. Burned, wounded and free-falling at over 300 knots, where only seconds before he had been in control of arguably the world's best fighter of his day, Lt. Walter Brown, of Marine Fighter Squadron 121, somehow had the presence of mind to pull his rip cord handle. Silk parachutes were never designed to sustain 300-knot openings but the miracles that day began stacking in his favor. When his canopy opened, all he remembers is a loud bang. True, later he found that the parachute harness (loosened up by the loss of all the gear stowed underneath it) stripped the muscles off of his unbroken leg and dislocated his knee - but he was alive. His immediate problem, however, was that he was alive and 1000 feet directly above a shooting enemy. With a presence of mind for which one can only marvel, he yanked on one of his parachute risers and somehow sideslipped his rig away from the land and, barely able to grab a breath, splashed into the ocean. He immediately released his shark repellent and his parachute and watched it hit the enemy-occupied beach only 100 yards away. With both legs useless and bleeding from open wounds, Lt. Brown began paddling with his arms into shark-infected water - but also away from the Japanese who had just turned their guns onto him. Even with his incredible luck, it was time for someone to lend a helping hand. Somewhere between spitting out seawater and gasping for air between waves, he looked up and saw, in quick order, two beautiful sets of helping hands organizing above him. The first was his entire squadron, which, under the leadership of Maj. Walt Meyer, formed a circle around him and proceeded to send a barrage of strafing fire onto the enemy. The second was "Dumbo", a Navy rescue flying boat. A lot of bravery was expended that day and Lt. Cmdr. Fred Mamer and his crew in that flying boat provided their share. After landing on the water nearby, with enemy mortars bracketing every move he made, he attempted two agonizingly slow passes to try to pull Brown in - on the third and last possible attempt, his crew dragged the nearly drowned aviator onboard. Lt. Brown's stack of miracles held that day and he made it back to the Peleliu airfield. Lt. Brown would heal most of his wounds but his fighting days were over. But his was not the only loss that day. On an earlier mission the squadron commander of VMF-114, "Cowboy" Stout suddenly had disappeared from the sky during his bomb run, without a hint of what had happened to him.
When bailing out of a burning, fuel- and bomb-laden Corsair in imminent danger of exploding, while falling at over 300 knots only 1000 feet above an enemy antiaircraft site still firing away, with a broken leg, open and bleeding wounds, third degree burns and no goggles, even a US Marine aviator can be forgiven for not determining the immediate fate of his fallen aircraft. Likewise, his squadron and certainly the crew of the Dumbo, focused on saving the aviator's life, can also be forgiven. In fact, no one gave any attention at all to the FG-1A, Navy Bureau Number 14257, which was stricken from the squadron roster after that mission. Happy just to be alive, Lt. Brown, after being stabilized and deemed transferable, headed home. VMF-121 headed home three months later and, by September, the war was over. Although most members of this famous fighter squadron, including Walter Brown, went back to civilian life, the camaraderie generated first by training together and then by fighting together, held this unit together with many reunions over the next half century. If questioned about his Corsair, Walter Brown assumed that his plane probably had crashed into the water not far from his own more successful landing. It would likely have remained this way, except a seemingly unrelated event occurred which would eventually introduce me to Walter Brown and ultimately reunite this amazing warrior with his lost Corsair. In July 1993, a group of divers and historians met in Palau, determined to find the Japanese trawler sunk there by then Ensign George H. W. Bush on 26 July 1944. In brief, with the cooperation of the Palauan government, the team found the shipwreck and proved that it had indeed been an armed vessel of war. Afterwards, two members of that team, my wife and I, stayed behind to enjoy the beauty of Palau. As with many people, we were not aware of the many air campaigns that had been fought over Palau between 1944 and 1945. But this soon changed. Our curiosity having been heightened by our recent find, we hired a Palauan guide to show us more debris fields. One of these we were taken to was a 65 foot wing, which lay in 3 feet of water off a small limestone island. Reading about history was one thing but touching that wing jerked me into the awareness that the men, who had flown the plane attached to that wing, had likely died nearby. No Palauan I later spoke with knew anything about that wing. In a flash and, ironically, within eyesight of nearby Battery Hill, this carefree trip started my quest to find out more. Armed with as much archival information as I could gather, I returned alone to Palau in February 1994 and with the help of the Belau National Museum, I hired a guide named Xavier. My marching orders were pretty loose: show me any aircraft wrecks you know or have heard about. And that's when Walter Brown's adventures in Palau began again - four years before he or I knew it. On 2 February 1994, Xavier introduced me to Arsenio, who had found an "army plane" a few years before in the mangrove swamps of northern Koror, while hunting for crabs. Arsenio was willing take me to it, since he could look for sea cucumbers along the way. We left immediately but our first attempt ended when we found our path into the mangroves blocked by an old sea mine, about 4 feet in diameter. The day's second attempt went no better. While I was experiencing the joys of traversing mangroves, my guides got well ahead of me and, before I knew it, I was out of hailing distance and alone. By the time we regrouped, the sun was setting and we exited empty-handed again. Fortunately, I was able to talk them into going back and the next day, we entered the mangroves for the third time. This time, within minutes, I started seeing a debris field of metal, almost golden in color, which turned out to be aluminum stained by fifty years of the black swamp elixir. We kept going further in, with aircraft fragments steadily increasing until there it was: the rear half of an aircraft fuselage, lying upright with the vertical stabilizer canted slightly to the right. Lying next to it was its Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine without propeller. The starboard wing lay a few yards away. The tail section, minus rudder was otherwise intact, although I could see no Navy Bureau Number (which would identify the specific plane). Only the word "NAV" could be seen on the vertical stabilizer. I could find no serial numbers on the engine or any evidence of the cockpit. Once again, sunset became a factor, so I photographed everything I could think of and we left. Other than identifying the crash site as a Corsair, I would not identify which specific Corsair it was that year, nor when I went back in '95 to search again, nor in '96 when I took my first team in to search further (that time I did find a very rusty 0.50 cal machine gun, once again with no discernible serial numbers). The Corsair continued to evade my identifying it and, although after three trips back I had collected quite a photo collection of that crash site, I had reached a dead end. Then, during a side trip a few days later to the tiny war museum on the island battlefield of Peleliu, the pivotal clue serendipitously emerged. Hanging on the wall was a framed article from an Ocala, Florida newspaper which told the story of a Florida man named Walter Brown who had been shot down over Koror in his Corsair. This was the lead I needed. After a little detective work on my part, I contacted Walter in August of 1996. I distinctly remember Walter's puzzled voice as I started explaining why I wanted to talk with him. In no time, however, Walter and I started a dialog, which has not stopped to this day. In April 1998, I had other business in Orlando and asked Walter if I could come down and visit him. Both he and his wife, Frances, invited me to stay with them. But the day I drove down, personal tragedy struck the Brown family with the unexpected death of their daughter's husband. I found a hastily written note on their front door, apologizing for their absence. Our meeting would have to wait until the following August before we finally met up in person at their home. To say they were hospitable does not do justice to their reception of me, a total stranger. Walter, called "Brownie" by his family, and Frances had prepared for my visit by collecting all kinds of information I might want to see. Walter (I never have gotten used to calling this former Marine fighter pilot Brownie) had an office displaying many of his World War II experiences. Frances had also assembled a scrapbook full of valuable specifics of his time on Peleliu. After two years of waiting, we wasted no time and began talking about his fighter squadron, VMF-121, and his experiences flying over Koror to suppress the Japanese Imperial forces occupying the northern islands of Palau. I brought my slides so that we could view the crash site I had found. Walter's son, Butch, joined us and the four of us sat in their living room, looking at all my jungle shots, collected over three years of mangrove visits. Walter very rapidly confirmed the wreck was indeed a Corsair. With no obvious identifying features that we could see, I asked him if there had been any distinguishing marks on the Corsairs for different squadrons on Peleliu. I knew, for example, that VMF-114 had a white band around the nose. At first Walter could not remember any such identification, so I kept on going through the pictures of the crash site. Suddenly, Walter spoke up - he recalled now that VMF-121 had a white band around the back part of the fuselage. We all stalled in midair at that moment - for on the screen was the back part of the fuselage and on it appeared to be a white stripe, just where Walter had said it should be. I raced to put up the prior slides and shot after shot showed the white stripe just aft the still-remaining star-and-bar on the fuselage. Since no other VMF-121 Corsair was shot down anywhere near this mangrove, the plane we were all viewing had last been flown by then Lt. Walter Brown. The pile of iron and aluminum was his pile of iron and aluminum. Men usually don't like to talk about it, but there were more misty eyes in that room that afternoon besides those of his wife Frances. Fifty-three years after his Corsair spun away from him, it reentered his life in his own living room. We were all speechless - and we remained that way for some time. There was just nothing any of us could think of to say. As a later footnote to this amazing day, the VMF-12I Reunion group asked me in 1999 to tell this story to the whole squadron at their annual meeting in Branson, Missouri. Chip Lambert, who had joined me during the 1996 trip to Walter's Corsair, had found the rudder trim tab control in the rubble around the fuselage. At the reunion, Chip presented that control device to Walter. What was so special about that particular rusted piece of debris is that it most likely is the last thing Walter adjusted to stabilize his dive just before being hit by the Japanese antiaircraft fire. The dial, still readable, remained as he had set it on the morning of March 4, 1945, 9000 feet over Battery Hill. It now sits under a very special glass bell in Florida, a long way from the swamp, where it otherwise was destined to stay, unidentified. On March 4, 2003, the P-MAN V team revisited the site one more time to carry a flag to the Corsair and back to Frances and Walter Brown, as a thank you for both of their sacrifices. Here's a photo of the
March, 2003 flag ceremony held at the site of Walter's Corsair. |